After gloating at my gains yesterday, I should have known that today I'd take a whopping loss of nearly 3%. As ET the Extra-Terrestrial would say, ouuuuuuuch.
I actually considered selling some of my holdings yesterday and buying them back in a day or two. BBBB, BEN, CMI, COP, EEM, HAL, ILF, LM, and TOT would have been excellent candidates for that as every single one of these stocks were down at least two bucks today. (HAL and ILF were down more than four.) But I decided that would have been short-term thinking. After a big move up you'd think they're going down soon on profit-taking, and if they do go down you'd think they have to go back up to where they were within a week or two -- but there's no guarantee of either. What you're really doing is adding two more 50% probabilities to the equation, reducing the total liikelihood that you'll make money even further.
I don't see the prospects of any of my holdings as particularly poor; many of these have had great runs recently, and occasional profit-taking is normal. January was just a great month for my portfolio and some kind of correction is not unexpected. I'm thinking long-term here.
If I had the ability to put more funds into the account, I might well consider this a buying opportunity, though, especially for the holdings I'm currently underwater on.
Posted by kindall at February 7, 2006 01:45 PM